Diarmuid Lynch was said to have been the last man to leave the burning
GPO during Easter week in 1916. A naturalised US citizen, he was
eventually deported in 1918, but the British had long wanted rid of him
before the Rising.

Files released by the British National Archives detail a conspiracy
involving US diplomats in London to have Lynch deported to the US after
embassy officials learned the state department in Washington was
preparing to revoke his naturalisation papers.

The file on Lynch, who had left Granig, Kinsale, County Cork, at 18 for
the US, begins a year or so before the Rising, with the British
authorities regarding him as “an undesirable” who had come “to
unfavourable notice”.

Dublin Castle believed he was a leading anti-recruitment campaigner [for
World War One], but no more dangerous. In reality, however, he was a
member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s military council and was
chosen by Padraig Pearse to identify a location in Kerry for Roger
Casement to land arms.

References to his US citizenship abound. In 1915, Lynch was deemed to be
an alien of a friendly nation and told to notify police of his
movements. He was labelled as an enemy alien in January 1916 and
subjected to tighter rules, which he ignored.

“There will probably be an Irish row about it, but nothing to what might
be aroused by a deportation order, which, indeed, I don’t think the home
secretary would be very ready to make in a case of a British-born person
like Lynch, even though he has ceased to be a British subject,” the war
office was told.

The British army, however, had wanted him deported long before the
Rising, with the war office telling the home office in December 1915
that he was “a dangerous agitator, if nothing worse”. Deportation was
“decidedly preferable”, it said.

Following his capture after the Rising, Lynch wrote to the US ambassador
in London in October 1916, declaring that he was a prisoner of war “and
not a criminal” and that he had “an international right to fight against
England”, but the letter was blocked by the prison governor.

Released, Lynch went back to Dublin, where he was soon embroiled in a
row with the Dublin Metropolitan Police over his claim that the enemy
alien’s order made against him no longer stood because he had been
released unconditionally.

Believing that he was about to leave voluntarily for the US, the British
authorities did nothing. But Lynch, by now Sinn Fein’s “food
controller”, was jailed again in February 1918 after he seized and
slaughtered pigs being driven to Dublin’s North Wall for export to
England.

In London a US embassy official was soon in touch with the home office
to say the state department in Washington was “considering” revoking
Lynch’s naturalisation papers because he had been out of the country for
so long. The state department had earlier written to the embassy in
London seeking details about Lynch in preparation for the withdrawal of
his naturalisation. A US embassy official then tipped off the home
office that it needed to move quickly if it wanted to deport Lynch.

The US official “thought, however, that we might like first to have a
chance of applying for his deportation”, the home office file reported,
adding that the US official had agreed to delay a reply to Washington in
the meantime.

Within days, a “rather truculent” Lynch was sent to Liverpool docks for
deportation, and he became even more annoyed when he learned he had to
pay the #10 9s 6d one-way fare.

His bride, Kathleen Mary Quinn, was stopped from travelling with him.
Sinn Fein had smuggled her into Dundalk Prison for the wedding, though
the British said they were unsure if they had properly wed. The marital
status of the couple vexed immigration officers, who believed they could
not stop her joining Lynch if they were married. In the end she was
prevented from going but joined him in the US afterwards.

In the US, he was elected in absentia to the House of Commons in 1918
and later to the first Dail. He played a role in influencing the House
of Representatives’ call for Ireland to be represented at the Versailles
talks.

Five years later, Lynch and his wife returned after a British official
in New York, filling in for a sick colleague, failed to spot that he was
on the suspects’ list when he applied for a visa to sail. Refused
permission to land, he was eventually allowed to travel to Ireland after
the Dublin government described him as “a friend of the Irish Free
State”.